Over the years I’ve worked with a lot of people who’ve opened cafes. One of the key ideas I’ve brought up early on is that for a new cafe, every single one of your customers currently buys their coffee from someone else. If you subscribe to Kevin Kelly’s 1000 true fans idea 1, then you need to find around 1,000 people to become your regular customers. They won’t come everyday necessarily, but if you’ve got a 1,000 loyal customers then I think your coffee business will be fine.

An important thing to think about is this: Changing where you buy coffee is changing the very routine of your life. It might affect your route to work, which public transport stop you get off at, or even what time you wake up in the morning. People are generally slow to change their lives. Owners of new cafes often get frustrated that in the first weeks of opening people come and say the drink they just had was, perhaps, the best coffee of their lives. Then you don’t see them for another week. Why haven’t they immediately made the switch, given that this is the best coffee they’ve ever tasted!? As I said, it takes time to change someone’s life.

This isn’t really what I want to write about now, but something related. What I want to talk about is what I see as a change in the dynamics of the coffee market in London, that raises a new question for me. Over the last seven or so years the market in London has changed dramatically. There has been a huge boom in the number of cafes trying to compete on the quality of their coffee. What has changed more recently is that the rate of new cafes opening has outstripped the growth in consumers for higher quality coffee. The market is becoming more competitive and cafes are beginning to actively engage in doing their best to capture and retain as many existing quality focused consumers. However, this means every new opening increases the competitive pressure on the market and the challenge of being successful is harder for each new cafe than for the last. I’m not saying for a minute that it was ever easy, but I do think that the attitude was a little different in the past than in the marketplace now.

All this does presume a fixed pool of consumers to draw from. Which, while technically true, is the wrong way to look at it. I think more effort needs to be made on creating more customers who would value better coffee.

Looking back, perhaps through rose tinted glasses, it seemed like there was a coherent movement in London to market the idea of better coffee. Not to market individual businesses, though that’s always going to be important, but to collectively promote and celebrate all that is good in delicious coffee – right through the value chain. Be it community events, coherent messages in the media, things like the Disloyalty Card – all of these contributed to the idea that better coffee was a good thing for everyone. I don’t see that coherent drive now, and I believe it is needed now more than ever.

Creating our customers, and not just stealing them from competitors, is vital for our industry’s longevity. I think many of the coffee roasting companies I respect are good at this. Taking the business of supply from another quality focused roaster does little to develop a marketplace, but working with new businesses to help them do more definitely does. I think this is worth considering in marketing strategy regardless of where in the coffee supply chain you lie.

This isn’t written as criticism of the way coffee businesses are marketing now. I want to highlight that there can be another message, or approach that could be more valuable to both businesses and the industry in reaching these new customers and a wider market. It is something I will be thinking more about, and trying to incorporate into the work that I do.

I am excited about the launch of a new coffee class from ChefSteps. If you follow me on twitter or elsewhere then you’ve likely noticed how much of a fan I am of what ChefSteps are doing. I genuinely think they’re one of the most innovative and interesting companies in food, and I can’t think of anyone else pushing out as much information for free. Their videos have made techniques that I had previously thought too difficult, or intimidating, seem approachable – and cooking from their recipes has resulted in some of the best meals of my life.

Hopefully you’ve already enrolled in the ChefSteps espresso class – if you haven’t you should do so now because it is free and because it is incredibly good.

I’d been talking to the team at ChefSteps for a little while about a coffee brewing class. I think their approach and style would be a great way to communicate both the techniques and the knowledge required to brew delicious coffee. While in Seattle last year, with Ben Kaminsky, we shot some videos covering techniques and discussion, and since then the class has been built up to be exhaustive and I think genuinely innovative. That class goes live today:

For the beginner:

There’s a great, thorough introduction to brewing better coffee covering buying coffee, getting the right equipment, an overview of dialling in, a guide to tasting and then techniques videos and guides covering French Press, Aeropress, and pour over. We cover what extraction is, why it matters and how to control it.

Aeropress brewing

For the knowledgeable coffee brewer:

You might think that if you’re already brewing tasty coffee at home then there’d be nothing for you here. I would disagree. There’s plenty of stuff in the course that I think would appeal to readers of this blog: rapid cold brew, Liars Latte (everything people like about milk drinks without any milk of any kind) and also some useful techniques to improve the quality of the ground coffee you brew with – regardless of the grinder you are using. There’s also a technique involving rinsing for french press brewing that had me utterly intrigued when they first sent through a little phone video of them doing it, and is the result of what happens when very smart food people start looking at coffee seriously. Easily the cleanest cup of french press you’ve ever had – completely sludge free.

The not-chocolate chocolate

They also get into that difficult realm: coffee as a culinary ingredient. There are several recipes here, some simple and useful, through to a whole new thing that is chocolate made without cacao and is my favourite thing on the whole course. I’m sure that if you work in coffee and watch this technique you’re going to get pretty excited too.

If you’ve bought a ChefSteps class before, or enrolled in one before, then you’ll have noticed that classes continue to be developed after launch – recipes get added, techniques further explored. I love that they do this, so it is worth returning to the class after finishing it.

There’s a great community around ChefSteps online – and I’d recommend getting involved there too, especially if you have any interest in cooking better, and understanding the theory behind the techniques in the kitchen. It is one of better discussion forums out there, and I suspect a lot of coffee people have a strong culinary interest too.

I hope you check out the class, it’s about the same price as a bag of coffee ($14), and I think that it’s a worthwhile investment.

I used to do annual predictions, and then I stopped but apparently I couldn’t quite give up the habit as last year I made some predictions about the C-market, and the coffee market in general in 2014.

So let’s have a look and see where I was right and (as usual) wrong:

We’re going to see less coffee from Central American producers ongoing.

This is, so far, looking to be fairly accurate. Crop years get confusing (we’re going to be receiving the 2014 crops of Centrals this year…). Data comes from the ICO: 1

We saw a further decline (13.4% decrease, down nearly a quarter on two years before) in Central American coffee primarily due to rust. There has been some recovery – but this year’s crop figure will give better insight into whether we lost some producers along with the drop in yields.

Hopefully the demand from speciality will drive the prices for high quality coffees up, ideally to the point where growing good coffee is sensible and sustainable.

Hard to speak across an industry. This was certainly true for the prices paid at work.

We’re going to see more coffee from Colombia. It seems like the rust resistant varieties are starting to kick in, and Colombia’s production is up.

This has been borne out – both Colombia’s production and its exports are up. More data from the ICO:

You can see from the previous table that Colombia’s production has been back above 12 million bags for the last couple of years, after the drop caused by rust. Notable is the amount of coffee exported which was jumped quite dramatically, despite a 2% increase in production there was an 18% increase in exports.

Brazil’s production is going to be sufficiently large that it will continue to squash the commodity price.

This where it all falls down. Brazil’s crop wasn’t as expected, the drought making news around the world. Looking at the traditional cycle of crops this should have been a big crop year, a record crop year in fact. It wasn’t:

You can see from the chart that this was a year that bucked the on/off cycle trend. As a result the market was a lot more volatile in the last twelve months and prices went back up. Predicting weather is something I am not good at, nor are humans in general beyond a relatively short timeframe. Whether we want to bring climate change into this as a potential factor may be worth considering, as this was the driest period on record since they started recording 84 years ago.

I haven’t seen much in the way of predictions for next year’s crop yet, and I have no idea how much other countries are looking to produce. It does seem that the expected consumption for 2013 pretty much matches production, and with an annual growth rate of 2% it also seems likely we’ll have a year in 2014 in which more coffee was consumed than produced.

I also made a few other predictions:

Supermarket/grocery store coffee is going to remain pretty cheap. I would expect it to increase with inflation/cost of living but to look increasingly cheap compared to speciality.

Not successful here either, or maybe a little bit so. Smuckers, a large US company, put up their prices(9%) and saw a large decrease in sales. Kraft also put up their prices (10%), and the market saw a shift to cheaper coffee. Which means cheaper coffee was at least sufficiently plentiful.

I don’t know of an index that compares typical specialty prices to commoditised coffee prices at retail (we’d have to define speciality first I suppose) but I don’t think any serious speciality company decreased their prices this year (evidence to the contrary welcome!)

Wholesalers of lower quality coffee will once again be able to leverage free-on-loan equipment more aggressively, as it will be easier to hide the margin necessary in the price of the coffee.

I did see a little more of this in London. I continue to see free equipment as a way to bribe a business into overpaying for low quality coffee. I don’t think it is smart long term business.

Roasters, and coffee shops, will have some decisions to make. With the gap between speciality and commodity likely to widen then the choices may be to go premium, to go mass market or to try and bridge both.

In truth this is probably a low priority decision to make for many cafes. A more important decision is probably whether things like multi-roaster purchasing/guest espresso are as profitable and worthwhile as they’d like them to be. I’m hoping to manage a coherent and ideally neutral post on the subject at some point soon.

Maybe I am just not talking to the same people but I feel that 2014 was a year wherein no-one really talked about certifications. Consumers, cafes, roasters, importers – I just didn’t really hear anyone say anything about them. I should probably track down some sales data on this…

So – a mixed bag of predictions and speculation. Make of it what you will. For the sake of being complete here’s a quick chart showing the C-market prices in 2014:

I don’t really feel in a predicting mood for 2015, but that may change later in the month – who knows!

This data comes from the September newsletter here: pdf. For their free newsletter keep an eye on this page. ↩︎

This data comes from the September newsletter here: pdf. For their free newsletter keep an eye on this page.

This post has nothing to do with coffee. It is all about software, and how I work. If this is not of interest then stop reading now. You’ve been warned!

I like technology, I like software. Often, when chatting with various people in the coffee industry the subject has ended up on software, tools and productivity. I usually rant for a bit, and afterwards several people have told me that I ought to write a blog post on this stuff. I have avoided doing it for years, but I figured I will do it now. So, here is a blog post about software I like and how I use it day to day.

I should make clear from the start that for the last seven or eight years I’ve been using hardware from Apple. I’m aware of the downsides of their walled garden approach, I’m annoyed also that their software quality has undeniably been declining over the last couple of years especially. Nonetheless I’m happy enough with the software people are writing to stay for now. As such links will be to iOS and OSX software.

The outboard brain

I’m a big believer in the outboard brain – a place to store all the things you need to do, to remember, to research etc. I find getting as much of it out, onto paper or into software, to reduce my stress levels and ultimately make me happier.

For this I use OmniFocus. OmniFocus is expensive, painfully so – though I see it as less expensive than most of the mistakes I’m likely to make (and what price is happiness).

At first glance it is a glorified to-do list, but it goes a bit further. You can add key bits of metadata to each task – Project (what this task is working towards or part of) and Context (where you will be to perform this task). That way I can look at my to-do list different ways very easily, for example I have a context of “amazon” for everything I must remember to buy the next time I’m shopping on there. Or I have different contexts for colleagues, so I remember what I need to talk to them about when I next meet with them.

Increasingly I try to block out certain amounts of my working day to focus on specific projects, so looking at a specific to-do list for things like Coffee Jobs Board or this blog is great.

The app has a section called the “Inbox” where you can dump in ideas before you add the relevant data to it. This is great for moments of inspiration, things to research, recommendations (restaurants, bars, books, films, music) etc etc… You can add images to tasks too, which I use quite a lot when I see inspiring pieces of design.

I’m really only scratching the surface here – there’s a lot more you can do if you’re willing to invest some time into this stuff. As I said – £63 ($96) for all three apps is a lot of money in the software world (these days anyway) but I love it to death. (I will spare you the rant about how I’m anti free software, and believe strongly in paying for things.)

Email

I hate email, I really do. I’ve been campaigning for years to convince people it should cost money to send emails (we’d all send and receive a lot less, and yet we’d communicate everything necessary and ultimately be more productive…)

Anyway – they’re not going away so I look for as much help as possible managing them.

On the phone:

For quite a while I was using an app called Dispatch that I think is great. There’s lots of genuinely useful functionality (I like all things like Text Expander though I never did quite get my head around their iPhone app). Recently my main email address has switched to using Google Apps which means I’ve been trying out a few new apps. Mailbox is easily the best (though only works if you have a Gmail backed account)

On the iPad:

Before using Mailbox for the iPad I was actually just using the default Apple Mail client. Software development rates and releases for the iPad are pretty depressing in a number of fields.

On the Mac:

I’m using Mailbox on there too for now but only to play around with (as it is still in Beta). I’m mostly using a rather lovely client called MailMate that is super geeky and wonderful. It is expensive, it isn’t pretty, it is incredibly powerful (especially the search – should you, like me have ludicrous numbers of emails) and it lets me write emails in Markdown (which is hopefully the nerdiest thing I will write in this post).

Services

I’m a big fan of Pinboard, when it comes to boookmarking. I love TextExpander for helping me with all sorts of things – I use stock email replies a lot less, but it has a million other uses. I’m painfully reliant on Alfred for doing or finding anything on my mac.

Prey Project was also recommended to me a few years ago, and there is an iOS app now too. I’d recommend people install this as its a useful piece of antitheft software. It’s clever, unobtrusive, free and I hope never to have to use it.

Other apps I think are good

iOS:

Tweetbot 3 – Best iPhone and desktop app for me. I like the iPad one too, but it hasn’t been updated for ages and looks pretty dated. Tweetbot 3 is intuitive, pretty, I don’t see sponsored tweets, mute is a great function etc etc.

Reeder 2 – I’d used this app for ages, then I went through a phase of post-GReader experimentation and ended up using back here using this as the front end of a Feedly account. I keep an eye on a lot of RSS feeds, which probably makes me a bit old school, but this is a great way of managing and consuming them.

Byword – I use this for writing blog posts and drafts of talks. It syncs across iOS and mac devices through iCloud so something I start writing on the bus gets finished on my laptop at the dining room table. Simple, wonderful.

Day One – I find writing a journal very rewarding, and it’s something I wish I did better. I love that this syncs between all devices and the desktop so I can write things in the back of taxis, on planes or sat in bed.

1Password – I don’t know most of my passwords, and that’s how it should be. Not enough people take password security seriously enough, and I certainly didn’t used to. Now all my passwords are all held in this app, synced everywhere and secure. 1 Most people’s password security is pretty terrible (great article on passwords here) so I try to do a little better.

I’ve held off writing this thing because I’ve always thought it wasn’t interesting to most people reading here. However, after enough requests I have given in. I will probably come back and update this from time to time.

I thought it might be fun to look back at this year via a few numbers that make up different parts of my life.

Words published in the atlas: 74,803

I’d love to do copies sold, but I have no idea and don’t find out until March.1 I’m still a little bit amazed that I actually wrote the thing, and I have a new found love of hashtags as people’s use of them on services like Instagram has allowed me to see the book pop up all over the place. It really does make me happy to see so many photos of it.

When I was travelling this year lots of people were asking about this, so I’m hoping to announce a number of translations and release dates in the next few months, which I’m very excited about.

Words written on the blog: 18,240

I’m sometimes surprised that I write as much as I do on here. If I hadn’t looked at the stats I would have guessed at barely half of this. I feel like I did nothing but talk about new projects on here, which isn’t really the point of this site – so less of that next year. 2

I’ve been rightly taken to task about my petulant failure with the learning project. I misjudged its failure, and as such would like to bring it back this year.

I’m also working up a few videos, seeing as the old videocasts have been lost forever. Some will readdress some old topics, some will be new things.

Flights taken: 44 / Distance flown: 69,788 miles

I fly a lot, and I have pretty mixed feelings about this. In the past I’ve done carbon footprint calculations to offset this, but even that felt pretty trivial. Doing what I do requires a lot of travel, but I can’t help but wonder at which point it will feel unsustainable to travel as much. Parts of it are enormously fun, and other parts require me reminding myself that I am at work and not necessarily supposed to be enjoying myself. Balance is important though – and working a little harder on improving that balance is important for me this year.

Countries visited: 16

I got to spend more time in Asia in 2014, and I finally got to visit China for the first time. It was fascinating, especially as you can’t help but feel that the wider coffee industry seems to believe that China is the land of opportunity. I’m waiting for coffee’s version of the California Gold Rush, though I think many people will find it to be a market entirely different from their expectations.

Applications processed via Coffee Jobs Board: 14,905

This is my favourite metric to look at when I login in to the back end of the website. I’m very proud of what this site has achieved so far. It isn’t bad for a new website, a little more than 6 months old. However, it is still well below its potential in terms of connecting people with employers and opportunities outside of the UK. I’d like to see the site flourish in 2015, so will be devoting a little more of my time and resources to it. My goal is for that number to be 50,000 by 31st of December.

Things that can’t be measured

I’m not sure at what point in my life I started planning an entire year ahead, but looking ahead I realise I’m going to be very busy. This is also the year where I intend to take a humane number of days holiday – I cannot stress how much of a mistake I consider my failure to take time off properly to be. With things like the Victoria Arduino Gravimetric launch, Re:co and more already lined up I know I’m going to be busy. Then there are a couple more little projects I’m hoping to get going this year too…

About a year ago, I wrote in a blog post: “In 2014 I want to follow through on things, achieve things and feel productive.” – sometimes it is nice to look back and feel like you did what you said you would ↩︎

It’s second run in the UK has sold out though, which is good!

About a year ago, I wrote in a blog post: “In 2014 I want to follow through on things, achieve things and feel productive.” – sometimes it is nice to look back and feel like you did what you said you would